The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (34 page)

He always felt he had blundered into a house of strangers. Who are these people? he kept asking himself, looking around. Are these people supposed to have something to do with me? Or I with them? Who's this wretched boy, and what's the matter with this sad little girl? Who's this clumsy woman, and why doesn't she do something about her clothes and her hair?

When he smiled at them he could feel the small muscles around his mouth and eyes performing the courteous ritual of each smile. When he had dinner with them he might as well have been eating in some old and honorable cafeteria where tables were shared for convenience, but where all customers, hunched over their plates, respected one another's need to be alone.

“Well, I wouldn't be alarmed about it, David,” his former wife said once, when he'd taken her aside to discuss their son. “It's an ongoing problem, and we'll simply have to deal with it on those terms.”

Toward the end of that visit he began counting the hours. Three hours; two hours; oh, Jesus, one hour more—until finally, gulping fresh air on the street, he was free. All the way back on the plane that night, riding over half of America as he munched dry-roasted peanuts and drank bourbon, he did his best to empty his mind of everything and to keep it that way.

And at last, trembling with fatigue at three in the morning, he carried his suitcase up the steps of his own house and into the living room, where he felt along the wall for the light switch. He meant to tiptoe quickly through the rooms and go to bed, but found instead that he had to stand a long time in the brightness, looking around, stunned by a sense of having never seen this place before.

Who lived here? And he started down the shadowed hall to find out. The door of the baby's room was only partly open and there wasn't much light, but he could see the tall white crib. And between the slender bars of it, deep in the scents of talcum powder and sweet piss, he could see a lump that occupied hardly any space but seemed to give off energy in its very stillness. Someone alive was in there. Someone was in there who would grow up soon, and who might turn out to be anybody at all.

He hurried to the other dark bedroom, where he allowed himself just enough light from the hall for guidance.

“David?” Susan said, half asleep, turning heavily in the bedclothes. “Oh, I'm so glad you're home.”

“Yeah,” he told her. “Oh, Jesus, baby, so am I.”

And in her arms he discovered that his life wasn't over yet, after all.

Susan found little to like in the capital city: it went on for miles, everywhere you looked, without ever really becoming a city at all. There were many trees—that was nice—but the rest of it seemed to be all shopping malls and gas stations and gleaming fast-food franchises. When the baby was old enough to ride in a stroller she hoped she might explore new parts of town and find better things, but that turned out to be as futile as wishing David hadn't gone to work for Frank Brady in the first place.

One warm afternoon, having ventured too far from home for comfort, she was on her way back, pushing the stroller, when it began to seem that she might not make it. There were only about three blocks to go, but in the shimmering haze of the day they looked like five or six, or more. She stopped to rest, breathing hard, and became very much aware of her heart—the approximate size and shape and weight of it, the feel of it, as well as its beating and its terrible mortality. The baby turned in the plastic seat to look up and to ask, with round eyes, why they had stopped, and Susan did her best to answer that look with a reassuring smile.

“We're okay, Candace,” she said, as if Candace could understand. “We're okay. We'll be home in just a minute.”

And she made the distance. She even made the stairs, which were the worst part. She got Candace bedded down, got the contraption of the stroller folded flat and put away; then she lay on the living-room sofa until her heart came back to normal—until the big thumping threat of it receded and was absorbed once again into the body that had been made to feel so good in pregnancy.

She was still on the sofa, wondering whether or not to take a nap, when David came home from work.

“Wow,” he said, sinking into one of the chairs across the room from her. “Jesus. Talk about a hard day at the office. I want to tell you, baby, this one was a bitch. . . .”

As she listened, or rather as she tried to listen while watching him talk, it occurred to Susan that he looked older than his age. He had taken to wearing a short beard, at her suggestion—it was she who trimmed it for him every three weeks or so—but she wasn't sure she would have suggested it if she'd known it would be white. And she didn't know if she would ever get used to his new hair, which had been entirely his own idea. As long as she'd known him his straight brown hair had been heavily streaked with gray, and she'd always found that attractive, but some months ago he had decided to let it grow because he didn't want to be the only man in the State House with a nineteen-fifties haircut, and now in luxuriance it was far more gray than brown. It was long enough in back to hide the collars of his shirt and his coat, long and heavy enough on the sides to cover his ears and to swing against his cheeks when he leaned forward, and it hung cropped in carefully irregular bangs across his forehead in the manner of the actress Jane Fonda.

That wasn't all: his legs, which she would have described as “lean” only a few years ago, looked so thin now in their neat gray flannel trousers as to suggest that he wouldn't be able to ride a bicycle without wobbling and veering slowly all over the street.

“. . . And there are times,” he was saying, delicately rubbing his closed eyelids with thumb and forefinger, “there are times when I wish Frank Brady would just go away and get lost. You can't imagine what the pressure's like in that sweatshop. Well. Get you a drink?”

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.” And she watched him walk out of the room to the kitchen. She heard the soft slam of the big refrigerator door and the breaking open of an ice tray, and then came something unexpected and frightening: a burst of high, wild laughter that didn't sound like David at all. It went on and on, rising into falsetto and falling only part of the way down as he gasped for breath, and he was still in the grip of its convulsions when he came weakly back into the room with a very dark bourbon and water rocking and clinking in his hand.

“Baby, listen,” he said as soon as he was able to speak. “I've just thought of the perfect revenge to take on Frank Brady. Listen. Staple—” But he got no further than that before the laughter hit him again. When he'd recovered he took a deep breath, made a sober face, and said, “Staple his lower lip to his desk.”

She achieved a smile, but it wasn't enough to please him.

“Oh, shit,” he said, looking hurt. “You don't think that's funny.”

“Sure I do. It's pretty funny, when you picture it.”

Then they were sitting close together on the sofa, and he was taking greedy swigs of his drink as if this rich, good whiskey was the main thing he had waited for all day.

“Could I have one too?” she asked.

“Have one what?”

“You know; a drink.”

“Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry,” he said as he got up to lunge for the kitchen again. “I'm sorry, dear. I meant to fix you one and I just forgot, that's all. I'm getting absentminded in my old age, that's all.”

And she waited, still smiling, hoping he wouldn't want to talk about his old age anymore. He wasn't yet forty-seven.

Another time, late one night when they were alone and cleaning up after having several people in for dinner, David remarked sourly of one guest that he was a pompous, humorless young twerp.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” Susan said. “I think he's nice.”

“Oh, yeah, ‘nice.' That word covers just about everything for you, doesn't it. Well, fuck it. Fuck ‘nice.'” And he slammed out of the room and down the hall as if he meant to go straight to bed. There was a good deal of thumping and banging in the bedroom for a minute or two; then he came back and faced her again, trembling. “‘Nice,'” he said. “‘Nice.' Is that what you want? You want the world to be ‘nice'? Because listen, baby. Listen, sweetheart. The world is about as nice as shit. The world is struggle and rape and humiliation and death. The world is no fucking place for dreamy little rich girls from St. Louis, do you understand me? Go
home,
for Christ's sake. Get outa here and go home to your fucking
father
if you want to find ‘nice.'”

While he stood shouting at her, with all that gray and white hair shaking around his almost eclipsed, almost forgotten face, it was like watching a child's tantrum enacted in the person of a crazy old man.

But it didn't last long. It was over quickly when he sat down in shame and silence to hold his elaborate head in his hands. Then, soon enough, came his choked-out, abject apology. “Oh, Jesus, Susan, I'm sorry,” he said. “I don't know what gets into me when I'm like that.”

“It's all right,” she told him. “Let's just—let's just sort of go easy on each other for a while.”

And going easy on each other turned out to be almost a pleasure. The gentleness and quiet of it, the temperance of it, permitted them both to shy away from the heat of each other's concerns without ever seeming to flinch, yet it permitted them the old intimacy too, when they both felt like it, and so they got along.

Through the difficulties of two more years there were times of peace, times of exultant companionship and other times of exasperation and bickering, or of silence; it all seemed to settle out into what David called a good marriage.

“Hey, Susan?” he would ask now and then, affecting a boyish bashfulness. “Think we'll make it?”

“Sure,” she would say.

Not long after his nation's withdrawal from the war that had impelled him to change his life, David Clark made arrangements to go back to his teaching job. He then wrote a letter of resignation to Governor Brady, an act that made him feel “wonderful,” and he urged his wife not to worry about the future. These years away from the classroom, he explained, had simply been a mistake—not a bad or a costly mistake, perhaps even one he could ultimately find profit in—but a mistake nonetheless. He was a school man. He had always been a school man, and would probably always be.

“Unless,” he said, looking suddenly shy, “unless you think of all this as kind of—going backwards or something.”

“Why would I think that?”

“I don't know. Sometimes it's hard to tell what you're thinking. It always has been.”

“Well,” she said, “I suppose that's something I can't help, isn't it.”

And they both fell silent. It was a warm afternoon at the end of summer. They were sitting with iced-tea glasses in which the ice had melted and the watery tea was almost gone.

“Oh, baby, listen—” he began, and he reached over to clasp her thigh for emphasis but hesitated and drew his hand back. “Listen,” he said again. “Let me tell you something: we'll be all right.”

After a long pause, examining her warm glass, she said, “No we won't.”

“Huh?”

“I said no we won't. We haven't been all right for a long time and we aren't all right now and it isn't going to get any better. I'm sorry if this comes as a surprise but it really shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you'd ever known me as well as you think you do. It's over, that's all. I'm leaving. I'll be taking Candace to California as soon as I can get our stuff packed, probably in a day or two. I'll call my parents tonight and tell them, and then my whole family will know. Once everybody knows, I imagine it'll be easier for you to accept.”

All the blood seemed to have gone out of David's face, and all the moisture out of his mouth. “I don't believe this,” he said. “I don't believe I'm sitting in this chair.”

“Well, you'll believe it soon enough. And nothing you can say is going to stop me.”

He set his empty glass on the floor and got quickly to his feet, as he always did for shouting, but he didn't shout. Instead he peered very closely at her face, as if trying to penetrate the surface of it, and said, “My God, you really mean this, don't you. I've really lost you, haven't I. You don't—love me anymore.”

“That's right,” she said. “Exactly. I don't love you anymore.”

“Well, but for Christ's sake, Susan, why? Can you tell me why?”

“There
is
no why,” she said. “There's no more why to not loving than there is to loving. Isn't that something most intelligent people understand?”

In an excellent residential suburb of St. Louis, a place of broad lawns and of deep, cool houses set back among shade trees, Edward Andrews sat alone in his study, trying to finish an article he'd been asked to write for a medical journal. He thought he had most of it right, but he couldn't find a way to work up the final paragraphs into a real conclusion, and every time he tried something different it seemed to get worse. The thing kept coming to a stop, rather than to an end.

“Ed?” his wife called from the hallway. “That was Susan on the phone. She's on the Interstate, and she'll be here with Candace in half an hour. You want to get dressed or anything?”

He certainly did. He wanted to take a quick hot shower too, and to stand at the mirror solemnly combing and recombing his hair until he got it parted just the right way. A clean shirt then, with the cuffs folded back two turns, and a fresh pair of lightweight flannels—all this to prove that at sixty-three he could still be spruce and vigorous for Susan.